On a bench in the Tiergarten, a young guy watches
birds through the mesh and railings. He doesn’t know
the name of the blue helmeted goose. We watch fiery

red flamingos on a diet of carrot juice and plump
pink spoonbills. A stork flies the scene haphazardly.
The flamingos scrap, steal sticks from a spoonbill’s nest.

It’s odd, noisy, compacted. A couple try to mate,
undignified, unbalanced to our way of thinking.
He is studying business engineering. ‘Never heard of it’,

I say, ‘but economics fingers everything these days.’
I hardly recognise the emu, imagining some connection.
A zebra, out on a limb, stands on silence.

The word ‘wild’ derives from the German wald for wood,
from a time when Europe was the wildwood,
mythic root of German racial purity, blood type A.

Gardens are an archaeology of touching forms of life,
the meanings we give them and how we use them.
City parks were parishes of peace from noise and speed.

Walking by the Landwehrkanal, I pass the spot
where Rosa Luxembourg was dumped,
product of another failed winter revolution.

I don’t recall any acknowledgement,
just a grass tide lapping the few trees.
There were probably pigeons watching.

Without map or memory, I’m turned around by a girl
on a bicycle, back towards the Brandenburg Gate,
‘a sea of fire’ for Adolf’s first victory in 33.

Walter Benjamin ‘envisaged an ordinary map . . .
"[that] would make a colourful show if I clearly marked
the houses of my friends and girl friends . . .

the hotel and brothel rooms that I knew for one night,
the decisive benches in the Tiergarten, the ways
to different schools and graves that I saw filled . . ."

The Room of Silence is silent because it is empty,
there is no statue, no plaque, just an abstract
wall hanging, fiercely lit by a helium light.

The woman at the door is a lovely guardian,
a Catholic, but all denominations are welcome.
Silence is such a responsibility.

The Reichstag is off limits, cranes spike the skyline,
building work hammers the whole ground,
what kind of Berlin will we be getting?

An army in helmets, wielding Geordie and Brummy accents
are digging foundations for another beating ventricle
of capitalism, here in the middle of everywhere.

In the middle of the night, a twenty-eight year old
East German officer with a brush and tin of paint
carefully bisected Friedrichstrasse with a white line.

Checkpoint Charlie has few relics- I’m surprised
the sign, ‘You are now entering the American Sector’
hasn’t been souvenired, or maybe it’s a fake?

A guard post remains, dwarfed by five buildings
shooting up, using the best international architects.
Hoarding details extravagant promises of culture.

There are three memorials to the wall. One, a museum
with a field of more than 1,000 black crosses for victims
of the border, is built illegally on land a bank owns,

Even today there’s no memorial in Germany to remember
those who refused war, brave heroes who would not fight
and were executed as cowards or traitors.

I find a piece of the wall
and a replica guardhouse
built on its original site.

Corpulent vibrations from the heavy machinery
are a reminder that we are made of dust
waiting for the demolition of rock, paper, skin.

I am naked. It’s humid, rain jumps thunder and lightning,
Sturm und Drang, In the middle of the night, the jackhammers
stop. I fall asleep. I wake up.